Assyrian International News Agency AINA
April 12 2015

Pope Francis Recognizes Armenian, Assyrian, Greek Genocide

By Jethro Mullen
Posted 2015-04-12 17:04 GMT

Pope Francis leads a mass for Armenian Catholics marking 100 years
since the mass killings of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire (photo:
Andreas solaro).(CNN) — Pope Francis risked Turkish anger on Sunday
by using the word “genocide” to refer to the mass killings of
Armenians a century ago under the Ottoman Empire.

“In the past century, our human family has lived through three massive
and unprecedented tragedies,” the Pope said at a Mass at St. Peter’s
Basilica to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armenian
massacres.

“The first, which is widely considered ‘the first genocide of the
twentieth century,’ struck your own Armenian people,” he said,
referencing a 2001 declaration by Pope John Paul II and the head of
the Armenian church.

His use of the term genocide — even though he was quoting from the
declaration — upset Turkey.

Turkey responded by summoning the Vatican ambassador for a meeting at
the Foreign Ministry, Turkish state broadcaster TRT reported.

In a tweet Sunday on his official account, Turkey’s Foreign Minister
Mevlut Cavusoglu called the Pope’s use of the word “unacceptable” and
“out of touch with both historical facts and legal basis.”

“Religious offices are not places through which hatred and animosity
are fueled by unfounded allegations,” the tweet reads.

More than a million massacred Armenian groups and many scholars say
that Turks planned and carried out genocide, starting in 1915, when
more than a million ethnic Armenians were massacred in the final years
of the Ottoman Empire.

Turkey officially denies that a genocide took place, saying hundreds
of thousands of Armenian Christians and Turkish Muslims died in
intercommunal violence around the bloody battlefields of World War I.

The Armenian government and influential Armenian diaspora groups have
urged countries around the world to formally label the 1915 events as
genocide. Turkey has responded with pressure of its own against such
moves.

Pope Francis said Sunday that “Catholic and Orthodox Syrians,
Assyrians, Chaldeans and Greeks” were also killed in the bloodshed a
century ago.

He said Nazism and Stalinism were responsible for the other two
“massive and unprecedented tragedies” of the past century.

CNN’s Gul Tuysuz in Turkey and Karen Smith in Atlanta contributed to
this report.

From: A. Papazian